You may already be rolling your eyes at the title, and when I tell you this is a drama of self-discovery from Tajikistan, it'll sound even more like the sort of SIFFocatingly earnest film that's so easy to mock. Kamal is 19, sharp-featured, geeky-handsome (imagine that Paul Reubens and Yoko Ono had a son), prematurely married, and impotent. He spends his days developing short-term fixations on women he sees in public, following them around aimlessly. He visits a cousin who suggests some dubious remedies: eating nuts, dried fruit, and honey ("You have to wait two months," however), and hookers. Eventually Kamal trails a troubled young woman to her place, falls in with her thuggish husband's criminal line of work, and—well, suffice it to say his manly powers are restored. Any other filmmaker would have made some overt point about the connection between violence and sexual satisfaction, but director Djamshed Usmonov, presenting in Kamal a protagonist so blank and affectless he occasionally approaches self-parody, never does anything so obvious as try to make any kind of a point about anything. His peculiar film is lovingly crafted but patience-trying. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT Pacific Place: 2 p.m. Thurs., June 7. Harvard Exit: 6:30 p.m. Sun., June 10.
Trail of the Screaming Forehead
The first 10 minutes of Trail are so funny that its eventual decline into mediocrity becomes profoundly disappointing. The movie is big on concept and style, but falls short on story and laughs. When vicious alien foreheads—yes, you read that correctly—invade a 1950s Americana town, it's up to two sailors and a librarian to set things right. The invasion coincides with controversial findings from two renegade scientists that the forehead, not the brain, may hold the entirety of man's knowledge. Trail is the latest film from Larry Blamire, who wrote and directed 2001's similarly campy The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. Blamire has a pitch-perfect ear for old B-movie dialogue, but the delivery of his actors is too self-aware, so the jokes mostly fall flat. Worse, Trail quickly runs out of ideas and starts recycling those jokes. Your brow will furrow in frustration. (NR) FRANK PAIVA SIFF Cinema: 9:30 p.m. Fri., June 8. Egyptian: 4 p.m. Fri., June 15.
An excellent argument for a vasectomy, the Swiss-made Vitus offers up another one of those annoying child prodigies who just wants to be a normal child, no matter that he's a genius pianist/financier who can afford to buy and sell normal childhoods a million times over. (Isn't stock market manipulation a bad thing for kids to learn? Never mind....) But we must try to sympathize with Vitus (played by two child actors at different ages), and listen to the sage advice of his wise grandfather (Bruno Ganz, showing the same twinkle in his eye that he employed playing Hitler in Downfall). Vitus belongs to what might be called the Euro-cute school of cinema, and its few tolerable scenes mock continental pieties toward culture and family. (The actor playing 12-year-old Vitus, Teo Gheorghiu, is an actual piano prodigy who does a very funny take-down of Russian romantic overkill at the keyboard.) Fortunately the Swiss know better than to make their chocolate this sweet. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Lincoln Square: 7 p.m. Fri., June 8. Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. Wed., June 13.
White Palms
This Hungarian drama follows gymnast Miklós Dongó through his arduous childhood training during the early 1980s and his career comeback as a coach in Canada 25 years later. Zoltán Miklós Hadju plays Dongó as an adult. His brother, Szabolcs Hadju, writes and directs. Both were gymnasts, and White Palms—the chalk applied to keep their hands dry, get it?—is grounded in realism; real athletes play all the major roles, which makes the training and competition sequences genuine and exciting. (2004 Olympic gold medalist Kyle Shewfelt fills one role.) The sport is actually quite thrilling on a big screen without an announcer in the background; why there aren't more good movies about it is beyond me. Also raising the stakes is Péter Politzer's editing, which crosscuts between past and present without ever losing the audience. His expert cutting makes the finale genuinely heart-pounding. Coupled with its true-life ending, White Palms is the perfect antidote to your typical slow-motion sports schlock. (NR) FRANK PAIVA Pacific Place: 7:15 p.m. Wed., June 6; 2 p.m. Fri., June 8.
